POV: tress
Summary
The chapter opens with one of the narrator's extended digressions: a folk parable from Tress's homeland about the palace tosher, the lowest of the king's servants, whose job is to sift the castle's sewage for anything useful. No one in the palace will listen to him, partly because of the smell. He likes baked potatoes; over time he gets the kitchen to serve him two a day rather than one, and the habit catches on with the other servants. Eventually the menu for the lower staff changes — cornbread instead of potatoes — and the tosher hates cornbread. He sets out to fix it, going up the chain of command (cook, butler, minister of trade, finally the king himself) and finding each official sympathetic-looking only because he reeks. The king, taking the petition through an inconvenient acoustic accident in the floor of his private chamber, explains that the potatoes are gone partly because pests killed the crop and partly because the tosher's own habit of asking for two had driven up demand and priced potatoes out of the servants' menu. The fable's third moral, the narrator says, is the one Tress is about to feel in her own life: small actions have consequences you do not get to choose.
The narrative resumes with Tress heading belowdecks from her bow-deck conversation, carrying what the narrator calls *emotional soap scum* — the residue any chat with Crow leaves behind. She spots Ulaam walking away from the deck (visibly disappointed that the laughter he heard was not, after all, attributable to an impaled crotch), and chases him down to ask a question she has been sitting on since the not-rat dissolved on her bedroom mattress.
Once inside her cabin, Ulaam gives her a brief inspection, declares she is *probably* still alive — granting that *talking* and *walking around* are not as conclusive evidence of being alive as she might assume — and asks what she wanted to know. Do midnight spores leave any kind of trace after the bond ends? Specifically, if one were using a midnight aether to sneak somewhere one should not be, and one were interrupted, and the bond broke. He corrects her that it is not a spell but a complex symbiosis between two entities, and offers (in the tone of a parable) that whoever broke the bond in time to save her deserves a thoughtful present — a spare shoulder, perhaps; humans, as he has observed, can always use more shoulders. Despite repeated promises he has never received a cold one as a gift. Tress hauls him back onto subject. He answers: no residue. As long as no one actually saw the Midnight Essence moving while she was driving it, the bond's collapse converts the body into black smoke that disperses quickly and leaves nothing behind.
Reassured, Tress admits why she is anxious — she has just had a conversation with the captain, feels like she got the better of her, and is worried that means Crow was actually working her. Ulaam takes the observation seriously. *And what did you talk her into?* Sailing the Crow's Song to the Crimson Sea, and Salay and the others will bring the Dougs along. Ulaam notes — politely — that the Crimson is something Crow already wanted to sail. *Yes, but I persuaded her without her knowing I was persuading her*. *To, again, do something she wanted to do*. Tress admits, sitting down, that perhaps she has not been as clever as she had thought; the doctor agrees the matter is self-evident.
Still, she argues, the deal looks like it ought to come out clean. She has spared more merchant ships from being sunk; everyone on board is going to a place the captain already wanted to go; if they actually find the dragon, Crow gets healed, the deadrunner strategy ends, and Tress is unexpectedly halfway to the Midnight Sea and Charlie. The trip is also, by definition, a trip toward Xisis.
Ulaam goes to one knee beside the bed. *Child*, he says, *Xisis is a dragon. He does not give boons. He trades.* Tress assumes treasure — does that mean robbing another ship first? Xisis, the doctor explains, has no use for money. He runs his experiments under the Crimson and has only one persistent need: servants who can survive the trip through the spores to him. The trade for one reasonable boon — a healing would qualify — is always the same: a single supplicant, indentured to him for the rest of their life, who can be led through a tunnel of spores without panicking. The novelty in this particular trade is finding an offering who is not afraid of spores.
Tress's mind, the narrator observes, fills with Crow's eyes as the Song left Shimmerbay and her new sprouter volunteered to stay — *you really aren't afraid of spores, girl?* Outside the cabin the seethe starts again, the ship lurches into motion, and the captain's voice rises on deck giving orders for one more port stop to take on stores for a long crossing. Tress understands, in one cold movement, the structure of the situation. The captain has been planning, from the moment of her hiring, to sell her to the dragon. The persuasive bow-deck conversation was real — but the destination was already decided; all she has succeeded in doing is hastening the Song toward the moment she becomes payment. She has tricked Crow. She has also, much more thoroughly, tricked herself.